Wildwood Boys

by James Carlos Blake

  “There’s but one way to cure the bite of a hoop snake,” Jesse says. “First, you have to kill it before it gets away, and to do that, you have to shoot it in the heart. Now its heart is exactly ten inches below the head. If you don’t hit the heart you’ll never kill it. You can shoot it a dozen dang times, you can shoot its dang head off, but if you don’t hit the heart it’ll just slither away like a raggedy old rope and grow a new head before sunup. But you hit it in the heart and that’s all she wrote. Then what you do is, you cut off a piece of the carcass and wrap it around the bite and leave it in place for twenty-four hours exactly, not a minute longer and not a minute less. You do that and you’ll be as right as the rain again.”

  They went into Boone County and reveled in the river town of Rocheport. Most of the residents hailed them as heroes. The bushwhackers paid for their first few rounds of drinks in the various taverns and then simply began helping themselves to the liquor, and no saloonkeeper dared to protest. The women gorged them with home-cooking. Men made presents of good horses to those guerrillas in need of new mounts. They passed to them every scrap of information they had about Federal doings in the region. They cheered and guffawed like spectators at a stageshow comedy while the bushwhackers fired fusillades at a passing steamboat, the bullets whining off the smokestack, gouging the railings and woodwork, humming into the pilothouse and splintering the walls over the heads of the captain and his officers where they hunkered down and prayed they wouldn’t run up on a sandbar or tear the hull open on a sawyer.

  As he strolled down the main street the next day, Bill spied a young boy of about eight grinning at him. He stopped and winked at the boy and said having his company in town was better than a circus, wasn’t it? “Oh, yes sir!” the boy said. The day before, Bill had taken a silver pocketwatch off the bank president, and now he presented it to the boy and smiled at his speechless delight.

  WOLF DAYS

  The company continued to draw recruits, fierce young men and boys eager to ride with Bloody Bill, the scourge of Union Missouri. By the last days of July, the Union command in Missouri elevated him to the top of their wanted list. “Anderson is the worst of the lot,” wrote one Yankee general to another. “His brigands are like a pack of wolves who have tasted human blood and henceforth will feed on nothing other. The sole solution to the problem he constitutes is to kill him, for he will surely continue to kill every Union man he can.”

  From the start, the Federals had sometimes hanged captured guerrillas and left them to rot on the rope, posting signs that warned against removal of the bodies. On rare occasion their Indian scouts had taken a scalp or two. But in this bloodiest summer of the Missouri war, the Yankees had been regularly retaliating in kind—scalping one or two men in every bunch of killed guerrillas, docking ears and noses and fingers.

  And now the war grew still more malevolent….

  Back in Carroll County, they ambushed Union patrols and cut telegraph lines, then cut them again as soon as they were repaired. They once more terrified steamboat traffic on the river. They camped in the bluffs north of DeWitt and Bill sent a pair of scouts to reconnoiter the oxbow region around Wakenda Creek, where Yank patrols were said to be roaming. By morning the scouts hadn’t returned, so he set out with two dozen men to look for them.

  They found their heads mounted on adjacent posts of a farm fence within sight of the creek, nettled crows flapping off them and into the trees as the horsemen came cantering. Pale as wax, hair wild, eyes hollowed blackly and lips in ruin, the faces looked like poorly wrought carnival masks swarming with ants. The fence posts beneath them showed blacked streaks of blood. A search was made of the area but neither man’s body was found. Butch Berry said they had likely been flung in the creek and carried on the current to the Muddy. “Some downriver farmer’s going to have an interesting moment when he goes to water his mules and sees what comes floating by.”

  Arch Clement had been fighting a grin and now yielded to it. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “You can’t get your throat cut any worse than that.”

  While a couple of the men dug holes with their bowies to bury the heads, Jim put his horse up beside Bill’s and said, “I can remember a time when this sort of thing might’ve set me back on my heels a little.”

  “I can’t,” Bill said.

  “They must’ve thought to jolt us with this,” Butch Berry said.

  “Damn fools,” Archie said. “We’ll show them jolts.”

  At the beginning of August they got word of the Confederacy’s plan to invade Missouri. General Sterling Price, commanding the rebel force, would come across the Arkansas border in September, march up through eastern Missouri, and attack Saint Louis. Once that key city was in Confederate hands, the South could recapture the rest of the state. Old Pap sent a request to all Missouri guerrilla chiefs to do what they could to keep Union forces busy and at a distance from Saint Louis.

  They stormed through Clay County, moving fast, burning Unionist farms and laying ambushes for Yankee patrols. Fletch Taylor led a small party of men across the Missouri into Jackson County to cause what consternation they might, but in a skirmish with Federals he had his right arm shattered by a rifleball. The doctor his men impressed to attend him said there was nothing for it but to come off, and so it was done. His men then took him to a trusted Lafayette County family, left him there to recover, and rejoined the company over the river.

  East of Richfield they caught a party of twelve Feds out in the open and killed them all. Every man of the Yanks was scalped but their leader, a young lieutenant whose severed and earless head hung dripping from a maple branch where Archie Clement tied it by its own hair.

  They headed back for the central counties, their pace varying, their route a meander. They came on farms that had been fled minutes before their arrival, the chimneys churning smoke, the animals in their pens and stalls, dinner plates sometimes still on the table, half-full and warm. They never bothered to search out the families hiding in the woods nor tried to determine if they were of Yankee or rebel allegiance. Bill’s rule was that any who fled them were Unionist, and in every case of a deserted farm he ordered his men to gather all the food they could carry off, then shoot the stock and fire the house and outbuildings. By the middle of the month they were being hunted by every Federal and militia unit in central Missouri.

  The very air seems charged with blood and death. East of us, west of us, north of us, south of us, comes the same harrowing story. Pandemonium itself seems to have broken loose, and robbery, murder and rapine, and death run riot over the country.

  —Journal of Commerce (Kansas City)

  Darling wife—

  I defer to no man in my hatred of Federals or my joy in their destruction,—but these newer rituals do sometimes seem less acts of war than antics of madhouse riot. But then, as you well know, I have been quite mad for some time,—from the very instant I met you, I have been mad for YOU. Never doubt that you are in my heart and thoughts every minute. I never shut my eyes at night without first stroking the lock of your hair and then studying your likeness by the light of the fire….

  Cherished husband—

  You do what you must do, I do not doubt it for an instant, but I do not dwell upon it. I have not used our lovely tub since your departure, nor will I until you return. I bathe at the creek. Were I to sit in that grand tub without you, I would feel adrift at sea….

  They met with Clifton Holtzclaw’s company in the hills of north Boone County and complimented each other on their good work. They shared a bottle and by the time they had emptied it they’d agreed to join forces, and so the Kansas First Guerrillas now numbered more than eighty men.

  But Holtzclaw had sad news as well, which he’d recently heard from George Todd. In late July, Todd and Dick Yeager had teamed to made a good raid on Arrow Rock in Saline County—they drove the Feds out of town and burned their headquarters, rustled a good bunch of horses, and got several wagonloads of goods. But as the Yanks made their retr
eat, they kept up a steady rear-guard fire, and Yeager took a bad head wound. Todd transported him a few miles upriver to the farm of an old couple named Jorgenson, who had several times given the guerrillas refuge and feedings. George gave them money and left Dick to their tending.

  A couple of weeks later, Todd got word that a Yankee patrol had showed up at the Jorgenson farm and gone straight to the barn loft where Yeager was hidden. They dangled him from a tree by his ankles and shot him repeatedly until he looked like a side of raw beef pasted with bloody rags. They tied him behind a horse and dragged him into town and there decapitated him and told the citizens to have a good look at how bushwhackers ended up. They rode off and left his remains in the street for the townfolk to bury.

  The word to George was that old Jorgenson had betrayed Dick for a fat reward. When Todd went back to the Jorgenson place, the old man came out of the house with his hands together like he was praying. He swore he hadn’t been the one to inform. Todd had the house searched, all the outbuildings, the well. A poke of U.S. money—nearly $200—was uncovered behind a stone in the springhouse. Mrs. Jorgenson tried to shield her husband but Todd flung her aside and clubbed the man with a singletree like he was trying to beat out a fire. He broke his knees, his arms, his skull, then dragged him broken and groaning into the house and set the place aflame. Then sat his horse out front and watched the building burn while the old woman stood by and shrieked like she’d gone crazy.

  August wore on. The Kansas First Guerrillas were several times badly bloodied. Two of their members were killed in a fight with militia in lower Boone County, then two more in a scrap with a Federal detachment north of Rocheport. A company scout named Oliphant was captured by the Feds and hanged before a crowd of civilians, then cut down and his body burned by the roadside. For some of the new Yankee recruits the entire episode was so vehemently novel they cast up their breakfast to the great amusement of their seasoned fellows.

  Back in Carroll County and encamped on Wakenda Creek, the company was ambushed by a Federal patrol in the middle of a moonless night. Dock Rupe was on picket and cried out the alarm just before he was throatcut by an Indian scout. The fight lasted ten minutes and no man clearly saw another but only caught glimpses by the flaring lights of the gunfire storm. The Yanks at last retreated, nine of their dead left behind, and the guerrillas rode away in the other direction, the dust of their departure settling in the darkness on three of their own killed comrades.

  Among the casualties was Bill himself, who’d been hit in the upper arm by a bullet fragment without damage to the bone. Hi Guess took a round in the thigh but would be all right to keep riding with the company. Arch Clement was shot cleanly through the calf. Frank James had been scraped on the side of the head by a passing round and the long welt where the hair had been removed looked more like a burn than a bullet wound.

  The worst of the wounded was the younger James, who’d been shot in the chest and two miles down the road fell off his horse. The company halted long enough for comrades to hoist him back onto his saddle and then Sock Johnson lashed the boy’s feet together under his horse’s belly and tied him snugly to his saddle by the waist. When they reined up at the Rudd farm to tend their wounds at last and take a day’s shelter, the James boy was slumped unconscious against his horse’s neck and the front of his shirt was weighted with blood. His eyes fluttered as they carried him into the house and put him on a bed. He coughed weakly and blood spilled over his whiskerless chin. His breath rasped. The Rudd woman shooed the men away and set to tending him. Not a man of them believed he would survive the night, but at dawn he yet clung to the spirit.

  As the company readied to ride off, he beckoned Bill to the bedside and whispered hoarsely that he would be ready to rejoin him by the time they returned.

  “Sure you will,” Bill said, and wished he believed it.

  A month after losing his arm, Fletch Taylor was back with the company, his comrades much impressed with the swiftness of his recovery and the skill of his riding and shooting in spite of his crippling. “I don’t need but one arm to fight a bunch of damn Yankees,” Taylor said. “It’s anyhow more of a fair fight this way.”

  Some days later, they ambushed a militia patrol near Russellville and Taylor was at the forefront of the charge when his remaining arm was hit from behind by a revolver round. Both bones of his lower arm were shattered, but amputation was unnecessary. Still, Fletcher Taylor took it for a sign that his luck was arrived at the rim of the abyss. He told Bill he’d had enough and was quitting the war. Bill gave him no argument. The next morning Fletch said so long to them all and that he hoped they’d meet for a drink some day. As they watched him being led away on his horse by a bushwhacker who would see him home, somebody said softly, “I hope Fletch’s wife truly loves him, else it’ll be a goodly while before his ass gets wiped again.”

  INCHOATE LEGENDS

  They said this about him, they said that, they said the other….

  Everyone knew of his vanity, his adoration of his own handsomeness, his morning habit of inquiring of himself in a handmirror, “Good morning, Captain Anderson. How fare you this morning, sir?” and every time responding, “Why, I fare well, sir, very damn well indeed.”

  They had all heard of his black silk ribbon, and by some accounts it now held more than a hundred knots. Some said that he’d tied so many knots on top of knots that they couldn’t be counted anymore, that the ribbon was drawn up into a single lump of a knot, like a cancer grown big as a fist.

  They said he had forever gone mad, that he rode into battle screaming his sister’s name as foam flew off his lips, that in the midst of a skirmish he would weep in becrazed fury because he could not kill Federals fast enough. They said he carried a pirate’s sword to chop off enemy heads.

  They said he could commune with wolves, howling back and forth with them over the miles of open prairie. That he could see in the dark like a bat, could smell any lie. He could know the thoughts of the dead when he stood over their graves. He could hear a human heartbeat at a distance of fifty yards. He never slept. It would not have surprised any who trafficked in such lore to learn he could set fires with a hard stare, could look hard at an overhead hawk and see the country all around as the raptor saw it.

  They said he’d been shot upward of three dozen times and had taken wounds that would have killed any other man, said he’d been shot in the belly, in the head, shot where his heart should be—and still he lived on. Some said he got his magical protection from his wife, who was an Ozark goomer woman. Some whispered he’d made a bargain with the Devil, though others said that made no sense at all, that the Devil didn’t make bargains to gain what was already coming to him….

  TUNES OF THIS WAR

  They are trotting in a double column through a wide meadow awash in goldenrod and flanked by dense wildwood. Crows observe their progress on this bright morning smelling faintly of woodfires. Riley Crawford is telling a story of a one-eyed dog he used to own when he was just a boy—Riley now all of sixteen—a dog given to poking around the creek in search of adventure who one day was bitten on the nose by a snapping turtle that wouldn’t turn loose for love or money.

  “I mean to tell you,” Riley says, “you never heard such a holler as that poor dog was raising. I had to—”

  His hat tilts and jumps from his head with a portion of his skull still in it and his head jerks around as if he would see where it was going—but he is already dead and the rifle report fading as he rolls off his horse and sinks into the tide of yellow flowers and the yelping company goes scattering into the cover of the trees.

  They spent the rest of the morning searching the surrounding country for the sniper, for some sign of a unit he might belong to. The videttes reported no hint of Feds in the area. The guerrillas were convinced the shooter was a loner who was still in his nook up in a tree or under a bush and they were enraged that they could not flush him out.

  “The son of a bitch is probably looking at us right this
minute with a shiteating grin,” Frank James said, scanning the wildwood all around. “I almost wish he’d shoot another one of us, just so we could get an idea where he’s at.”

  They retrieved Riley Crawford from the field of flowers. In death the boy looked even smaller than his diminutive living self, seemed even younger, a child in oversized garb playing at war. They lashed him to his horse and rode on.

  Two miles down the road they arrived at a small farm where lived a young couple and their three small children. While some of the guerrillas searched the outbuildings and others went through the house, still others made use of the farmer’s pick and shovel to bury Riley Crawford in a small clearing in the trees behind the house.

  Bill asked the farmer if his allegiance was Union or southern. The man was hesitant, wondering perhaps if he was faced with true Fed erals or guerrillas in disguise—or Federals pretending to be guerrillas in disguise. Then said he wasn’t either one, he just wanted to stay as far out of the war as he could.

  Bill spat. “That line’s been too long worn away for anybody to stand on it,” he said. “You best pick a side, mister. Go ahead, pick—maybe you’ll guess right. Or you can just tell the truth and say what you really believe.”

  “I used to believe Jesus was coming,” the man said. “But anymore I believe he’s changed his mind.”

  Bill made a small smile. “My, that is a hopeless outlook.”

  Butch Berry heard this as he brought his horse up beside Bill’s. “He got reason to be hopeless—look here.” He handed Bill a Union army cap. “The boys found it in a corner of the barn.”